Resident Evil Tops Box Office, While The Master Breaks Records

It was a good weekend to be a Paul Anderson at the box office. Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s video game-based Resident Evil: Retribution topped the domestic box office while Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master did record-breaking business at just five art-house theaters.

The fifth installment in Sony’s Resident Evil franchise, Retribution pulled in $21.1 million in the United States, followed by Pixar’s 3D presentation of Finding Nemo with $17.5 million. The rest of the top five was pretty lackluster, with new horror film The Possession making $5.8 million and previous releases Lawless and ParaNormal rounding out the list.

The real money-making news came from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Weinstein Co. release played in only five theaters in New York City and Los Angeles, but earned $729,745, breaking the previous indie per-screen record held by Moonrise Kingdom.

Expect lots of shifting around this weekend as a slew of movies hit, each with its own target audience: There’s the comic book-based actioner Dredd 3D, the gritty cop drama End of Watch, horror flick House at the End of the Street, the father-daughter baseball drama Trouble with the Curve and the coming-of-age story The Perks of Being a Wallflower.